Copyright, Fair use, and Creative Commons

So Today I added a creative commons license to the ltop right corner of my blog. It was really easy. This made me decide to write my Blog post today on Copyright and how it affects us as educators.

Lots of people think that it is okay to use any material any way they want as long as it is for education. Truth is... That is not true. There are a lot of licenses and laws that can prohibit use of material, limit use of material, and govern how material is used and where. Educators must be very careful when they plan to use material that they have not licensed or created themselves. I am going to summarize the differences and similarities between Copyright, Fair use and Creative commons.

Copyright

Copyright laws were created to protect the authors of original work. It oulines who gets paid for their original work and also who has to pay for that work. Copyright lasw vary greatly between different countries, and even different forms of work. As a general rule in Canada Copyrights protect work for the life of the author and an additional 50 years after the author's death. Unless someone renews the copyright, or in other special cases the work becomes part of the public domain. Using copyrighted work without permission can result in legal action, commonly law suits, claims and injunctions.

There are some exceptions to copyright laws. Sometimes the government can give special permission to certain groups, who are generally working for greater public good.

Example:

Format shifting (reproduction for private purposes)

Time shifting

Back-up Copies

Non-commercial User Generated Content

Also educational purposes:

Publicly Available Materials on the Internet

Distance Education

Cinematographic works

Reproduction in Class

The General rule for using copyrighted material in classroom situation is to ask yourself: Am I reproducing this to save the students purchasing it? If so, then you are breaching Copyright. 

Here is a link to Canadian Copyright Legislation http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/C-42.pdf

Fair Use

The basic definition of fair use is that the use of material does not hurt the market for that material.

Fair Use is an exception to copyright laws that include:

Research

Private Study

Criticism

Review

News Reporting

Fair dealing is a very American Concept, but has been adopted by Canadian Copyright law as well. Canadian laws have more control over Fair Use. To Qualify as fair use of copyrighted material, the material can only be used for the reasons above. Not much else qualifies.

There is a 6 factor test that the suprme court uses to determine if a use is fair or not. A really good explanantion of this test can be found here http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6616/125/

The basic steps are:
1. Purpose of the dealing
2. Character of the dealing
3. Amount of the dealing
4. Alternatives to the dealing
5. Nature of the Work
6. Effect of the dealing on the work.

Creative Commons

Creative commons is a non profit organization that provides free tools to allow anyone to share their intellectual property. They provide free easy to use licences that limit the use of your intellectual property. Their website can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/

This video posted on their website is a really simple breakdown of what they do http://creativecommons.org/about it's short and full of good information.

Creative commons provides tips for making sure that the information you use is not copyright proptected, and has amazing resources to find images and music that is free to use.

Creative Commons is a great tool, and I will definately be using it more in the future